Sticks and Stones, Silk and Ink
The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood by William Whyte (Harvard University Press, 2026)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
These days everyone is arguing over radical students and faculty, AI in the curriculum, the role of future employment in learning, and tuition. If someone attends a university or works at one, they are also complaining about parking. But you can put all of that aside and pick up The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood and learn from William Whyte about the history of universities, their architecture, medieval academic clothing, plague-canceled terms, communist campuses, and more. It is a delightful book, filled with information and often quite entertaining.
The University’s eight main chapters are cleverly organized around materials. The materials are: straw, stone, flesh, blood, silk, paper, iron, and concrete. In these chapters, Whyte looks at universities the way that Robert Darnton taught us to look at books (and Darnton is one of the endorsers on the book’s cover). Whyte traces the history of the university—names and traditions, practices and places—through its materials. These materials take readers down interesting paths. For example, the chapter on straw describes how students at the University of Paris bought bundles of straw to sit on during lectures. The practice gave the Rue du Fouarre its name. Among other things, the chapter on blood includes the role of anatomy theaters in universities and the racial purity tests in Spanish universities. Through the book, readers learn about the rise of paper, the reshaping of colleges by concrete, examination systems, punishments involving drinking ink, and much more.
The materials which anchor the chapters open the door to wider discussion. The chapter on silk begins with a visitor’s dismay about student attire at the University of Leiden in the seventeenth century. That flows naturally into the kinds of concerns people have seemingly always had about student beliefs and behaviors, including immorality and excessive luxury. The visitor was also somewhat typical because the seventeenth century was, in fact, a moment of crisis for universities. Whyte tells us that “there was a growing sense that somehow something had gone wrong with the universities’ modes of study, forms of thought, kinds of life and lifestyle” (155). Plague and war also contributed to that crisis and disrupted teaching.
The University is a good example of attention to change and continuity in history. It is something of a relief to find that people have been unhappy about radical students since universities started having students. Curriculum has been controversial before—Wycliffe’s work is a good example. The seventeenth century crisis of universities offers some precedent for our own time. But The University also delights with all the differences between our time and the past and it is rich with detail about those differences. For example, readers will learn that “a great Bible might use the skins of between two hundred and four hundred beasts” when done on parchment (44). And in the twelfth century, at least one monk believed a day’s writing required sixty to one hundred quills (46). Whyte manages to bring in a wide variety of interesting examples, without descending into trivia.
If anyone doubts that materials matter much when it comes to universities, pause and imagine a generic university in your mind. By the twentieth century, there was a certain image of what a university ought to look like. A language of university architecture had emerged. At universities around the world, “Buildings and things were expected to convey values and to have an impact; indeed, in universities, they were believed to have several different sorts of impact” (286). John Ruskin believed that architecture reflects its age and culture. Universities have enough past and have established enough of a culture to have a characteristic architecture. Departures from it—in places like the Soviet Union—were intentional and explicitly political. The physical features of university spaces have been, and remain, significant.
In The Human Condition, Arendt urged readers of the necessity “to think what we are doing.” While not everyone practices that, many books emphasize reflection on our actions. The University encourages reflection on our environment, especially our human-made spaces. Discussing mid-twentieth century trends, Whyte emphasizes that “the material world was widely understood to matter” (286). The entire book affirms that statement. Our ideas and actions are formed and occur in physical spaces, with materials that have history and meaning.
The University is an enjoyable read. Whyte’s frequent use of the word “stuff” is a bit of a surprise in a book from a university press, but it does not disrupt the narrative and his book is about the “stuff” of universities: wood, stone, concrete, etc. Only readers associated with Cambridge may be offended, at times, by this book. Himself a professor at Oxford, Whyte loses few opportunities to comment on Cambridge’s allegedly unsuitable and swampy climate. In a characteristic passage, he refers to Cambridge as a “gloomy fenland redoubt” while quoting an eighteenth-century letter complaining about Cambridge’s insufficiently large and interesting town (190). If anything, the digs at Cambridge are an additional form of entertainment. These Easter eggs for Oxford partisans are scattered throughout.
Though it is primarily an examination of the physical university, The University offers a balanced look at the nature of the institutions. Whyte covers the expansion of universities around the world and the role of things like state patronage and slavery in building and sustaining a number of universities. Describing universities in the eighteenth century, Whyte writes: “Claiming to be cradles of civilization, yet dependent on barbarity; established to educate the poor and pious, but now seemingly sites of pleasure and plenty: universities were paradoxical places. They were also hugely vulnerable” (208). The same might be said today. Universities are characterized by high ideals and noble aims, but they are also characterized by politicization, social stratification, and sometimes absurd endowments. They offer some of our best and worst examples of attempts to foster an educated citizenry with equal access to opportunity. They are fully socially entrenched, yet at the mercy of budgets which can reflect the public’s mood. Universities employ fewer barbers and bell ringers today, but there are still many staff positions that would surprise outsiders. They remain paradoxical and vulnerable.
It would be a shame if only people interested in academia picked up The University. The book is not only entertaining, it offers a compelling narrative from the medieval world to our own. The recent rediscovery of Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History (2002) will hopefully lead to more readers picking up books that can filter wide ranges of time and space through themes. The University is interesting, informative, and a very refreshing alternative to another polemical take on higher education.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. She is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023) and she is a contributing editor and associate books editor at Front Porch Republic.
